I was grateful to re-visit, via video tape,some of Stephanie’s early work, much of which I saw in the 80s, when I started to be involved in the scene. Stephanie was an influence, “ahead” of me, already an integral part of the downtown dance world centered at Danspace, the Kitchen, PS 122 at the time I was just starting to make work. Upon being invited to visit us here, Stephanie had asked me whether she was coming to”history in the making” as an influence herself or as a teller of her own influences. She wisely did a bit of both, but what I remember now, so tardy in posting here, is how seeing her work and those of her peers opened my mind as to what performance could be, as well the kind of community that could exist around it, when I was just starting out to make work. Here’s something recently said at a PS 122 event by honoree Ishmael Houston-Jones that brought me back to that time:

“…the best thing about PS 122 was that it was not about solitary individuals. Rather, it was about forming a new kind of community, or a new kind of gathering of tribes; a new kind of family. A family that offered a new model for a home for performance. And we were so fucking pretentiously hardcore in those days, we’d only call it “performance.” Never performance art, not experimental theater, not post-modern dance. And we never referred to the space as a theater. No, we were doing “performance” in our “space” – even when our space had no heat on the weekends, the lights were clip-ons and the sound system was a boom box. We were forming a new kind of performance family to make new kinds of work.”

Anyway I enjoyed the layeredness of time-traveling back to those years and that place—PS 122 was one of the places I first saw Stephanie’s work and also performed my own work—and then coming back to the PWNW in 2009 to directly experience how Stephanie has distilled all her experiences in dance, performance, video, writing and theater into techniques that bring us in to our body and jog our minds and subconscious loose.

http://www.movementresearch.org/publishing/?q=node/495

In addition to the editorial note, my contribution to the issue was an interview with Yvonne Rainer done by co-editor Anya Pryor and myself. And speaking of Rainer, walked into the Museum of Modern Art in NYC a couple weeks ago and saw Trio A being projected large on a gallery wall. I had just finished learning it with Linda K. Johnson. Now I am getting our of practice again due to a re-injured knee, damn.

Also at the museum, and of interest to our group, was a Teh Ching Hsieh retrospective: posters from all of his one year performances, the cage he lived in for a year, the series of 365 photos taken of him every day during that same year, etc. I thought it funny to see all the earnest young things taking photos. Then I decided to be funny, too, and took a couple photos with my phone! Also a couple of the Trio A film.

We started with an exercise used in Tuning Score workshops that I have done with Lisa Nelson and Karen Nelson: making up a simple short series of movements to pass on to a partner who has her eyes closed.

Then participants created and performed movement phrases “caught” in short snippets from my improvising. They were beautiful and reminded me how it’s possible to generate interesting material very quickly.

Cydney introduced us to one of Anna Halprin’s process, using the RSVP cycle, which she and her husband Lawrence developed. We looked at our Resources, Perfomed a Score C had made up, then went through a feedback which led into Valuaction, and then altered and Performed the score again.

Lastly we discussed Deborah Hay’s unique concept of choreography, her process of passing her work into other people’s bodies/minds and looked at parts of her group piece The Match, while following the corresponding written out libretto.

I should have had Emily take notes and write this. Actually a good idea would be to get a volunteer to record both activities and impressions, instead of it being me, me, me. Anyway, Emily was very forthright about how the topic of the day is a problem that she wrestles with, worries at, gnaws at.

For this day devoted to questioning art | life connections/contradictions, I chose two examples. The first was Tehching Hsieh’s year-long performances, especially the collaboration with Linda Montano in which they were tied together with a rope.  It was fascinating to learn a little bit (via interviews, etc) about how each of them thought so differently about what happened that year and what its significance was. The other exemplary project we looked at was Neil Greenberg’s Not About Aids Dance and the Disco Project, via Charles Dennis’s video of a PS 122 performance, intercut with interviews.

But back to the beginning. After introductions, we talked a little bit about the day’s theme and our interest in it. I listed a few tactics or strategies I have seen used to try to “solve” the art – life problem. We warmed up individually while listening to an internet radio interview with Hsieh and Montano. Then we did a series of 2-minute improvised duets with the interview as soundtrack. Each duo had to keep physically within 8 feet of the other while avoiding touch—two of the limitations taken on by Hseah and Montano in the year they were tied together.  It was interesting to hear Lily afterwards talk about her deliberate manipulation of the power dynamics.

We broke the already tenuous separation between home and studio by entering into the living space to watch Neil’s work. I loved seeing the dances and hearing him talk. I realized once again how a personal connection to the artist and his/her history adds a life poignancy even to the most non-narrative works. The reactions to Neil’s work were revealing. Georgiana, a non-dance person, had a hard time knowing what to “see” in the solo excerpt from Not About Aids Dance, and talked about how the extra-dance elements, which were more obvious and in what we saw of the Disco Project, plus being able to hear Neil’s interview, gave her a context for “getting” that dance more easily. I, of course, am happy to watch “pure” movement and in silence, with nothing else, depending on the kind of movement, the environment, the level of intimacy or formality. Hey I guess those are contexts, too.

Anyway, all were impressed and moved by the smart, witty yet honest (not arch) way that Neil framed his work. He  found a way to keep to his own non-narrative non-illustrative way of creating movement while letting in autobiography and social concerns (AIDS). And, this from Emily, (but in my hazy words): maybe it was the latter, the situating within social context, that helped buoy the piece out of wallowing in a more sophmoric self-indulgence.

After a break, with more talk and snacks, we all created solos in Jeff’s and my living/dining/sleeping area. We performed them for each other. It was pleasurable to see people making movement in my cramped living space, animating closets, tables, chairs, bookshelves and the spaces shaped by the furniture. Finally, we took what we had made into the studio and performed the solos in groups, 3-4 people simultaneously.

Well….it’s a BIG topic and we just touched on a couple of issues, but as in all the Sundays, all the themes will come ’round again even as we focus our attention somewhere else.

Next month: Choreographic Transmission. Cydney Wilkes as guest to lead us in Anna Halprin’s scoring ideas. Plus looking at the written out score for Deborah Hay’s The Match and watching the performance on video. Plus investigating the traditional method of making set movement on one’s own body and teaching it to another. Plus…more!

After the December session being canceled due to weather, it was great to get together with everybody again last Sunday January 12, especially since the talented and articulate Linda K. Johnson was present to share her expertise on Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A. Attending were Linda K., Linda A., Lisa, Lily, Lilly, Lois, Kathleen, Anne, Chelsea, Catherine, Emily, Meg—the ‘L’s win every time!

LONG Background—skip if you like—this writing is practice for a grant application!
I have been working on and off on a piece called “Paired Spectacular”– inspired by my direct physical and perceptual interactions with dance works by two women of the Judson generation. I learned, practiced for a year, and performed a recent solo by Deborah Hay and am again in the process — after almost a year hiatus — of learning Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A from Linda Johnson. We are lucky here in Portland to have Linda for many reasons: one of them is her position of custodian of Trio A. She is one of three people Yvonne has approved to teach the piece to other people for performance.

It’s been so fascinating to me to note my own instinctive alignment with the work of each of these women, disparate though they are. Yvonne’s piece (from 1963) has a very exact and exacting physical score, and an avoidance of engagement with the audience (at least with the eyes). The teaching of the piece avoids using images or metaphorical language. In contrast, Deborah’s piece, an example of recent work (2005), has very few prescribed movements. Its score consists of a precise set of directives that, in essence, choreographs the dancer’s perceptions, often through “impossible” tasks that may or may not be couched in imagistic language. Another interesting difference is that , whereas Trio A is all Yvonne, my version of “Room” is called a “solo adaptation” of Deborah’s choreography, incorporating my own expertise as a choreographer.

Yet, as singular and individual as each work is, I also love sifting out their affinities. Both have aspects of juggling two or more discrete tasks at once: on the physical plane (Yvonne) or in the perceptual realm (Deborah). Both subvert conventional demands of beauty and virtuosity in dance, albeit in different ways. The work of both, and of their peers in the Judson dance group, have been absorbed, refined, transformed by succeeding generations of experimental dance artists like myself. I feel such a personal passion for this stream of work because it is what made possible the rather delayed entrance into dance of a non-technically trained person like myself when I was in my mid-twenties and living in New York City.

Throughout my own trajectory, I have noticed in my making an attraction to making precise prescribed movements in a stinging-beads manner, as well as a love for approaches that are more open physically yet still very specific.  (OK OK! I admit it–I like to improvise. Deborah, however, doesn’t like that word applied to her work.)  Somehow it came about very naturally that after practicing one day what I knew of Trio A,  I started to create some movement that was Trio A “like”. That was the germ of the idea to create two dances, each following the approach as I understood it, of each iconic figure.  The process becomes then a kind of measure of my own response — because sometimes I unwittingly can’t stick to it, to being “true” to the procedure I have laid out. Sometimes I simply and consciously rebel. Negotiating all of this is part of what holds my interest in this undertaking. Although this negotiation isn’t apparent to audience members when I perform the final work, the threads that tie it all together are certainly my own choreographic choices, my own body and consciousness and that of other performers.

There is also a hinge section at the midpoint that is perhaps more freely “me” as I’m just doing what I want irregardless, and that both separates and connects the two sections. It involves a sound-making visual element that remains present in the 2nd dance (the Trio A-like part)

The vision for the Jan. 12 history in the making session was to bring some of this comparison out into the open for the workshop participants, to introduce both Rainer and Hay to those who didn’t know their work and place in our own dance lineage, and to take advantage of Linda Johnson’s expertise in all things related to Trio A.

Description of the Jan. 12 doings
After brief introductions, I talked about my piece in progress “Paired Spectacular” described above. Then Linda K. told the story of how she first got involved with Trio A–from seeing a video at the Guggenheim Soho (not sure what year this was)  of Rainer, Steve Paxton and Robert Rauschenberg performing it. Linda K. described very eloquently her bemusement, befuddlement, fascination and her subsequent determination to intimately know this piece.

When she had an OAC fellowship, Linda K.  went to NYC to learn Trio A, first from Clarinda Mac Low, who had learned it from YR for a Judson retrospective in the 90s??. (Small world data: Clarinda was my roommate in NYC for my last years there!) Later, Linda re-learned it from Yvonne with Shelley Senter. Those tow performed it together at Reed College a few years ago as part of a project that revisited Rainer’s work as well as works by Bebe Miller, Remy Charlip, and Trisha Brown, whom Shelley had danced with for many years. Linda’s connection to  Yvonne and this work in other contexts has resulted in her being in the position of being able to pass it on to others.

Linda gave us the text of Yvonne’s comparison of some post-modern dance characteristics with minimalism in visual art. We talked about some of the ground rules YR was using as she accumulated the piece, working every day back in the early 60s: averted gaze from audience, discrete movements linked together with no stops and an even pace, no one thing more accented/emphasized than another, no momentum, etc. We worked making our own short sequences using same ideas and shared with a partner.

Next Linda K. performed Trio A twice, in the way Yvonne likes it: first in silence and then accompanied by Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour”, which led to talk about the function of the music and its power to seemingly tie the movement together, in spite of the fact that it’s on a separate track, i.e. the dance doesn’t “go” in any sense with the music, but has its own (evenly-paced) timing and in fact must resist being pulled into  accenting the beat.

Then Linda K. demonstrated the rigorous “cleaning” that goes on the teaching/learning of this dance. I hadn’t had a session with Linda in months and months, and only a couple weeks ago started trying to practice it again, so it was very real life. I did a short bit from the beginning and Linda K made corrections, I asked for clarifications etc.

Then we all sketchily learned a small section from Trio A: the iconic arm windmilling sequence, lowering the body to the floor through the “hand flipping” sequence.

We talked, Linda answering questions….wish I could remember all this richness. Her motivations in avoiding the audience gaze was one topic.

Linda left for family and we had a break.

Then it was Deborah Hay’s turn! We didn’t spend as much time on her as we did on Yvonne, but we will come back to Deborah in the session on “choreographic transmission.”

We did a short session moving to the directive “What if every one of my 300 trillion (correct number?) cells at once had the potential to perceive the uniqueness and beauty of all there is.”

Then I showed them my booklet of the score for “Room”, talked a bit about learning it at Findhorn for the Solo Performance commissioning Project, and how Deborah writes out the dance as a “libretto” in 3rd person. We recreated and practiced a bit from the opening of “Room” — Kathleen, Lisa and Lily G had already experienced learning part of it from D. at SFADI a few years ago.

Interestingly enough I remembered a detail afterwords that I hadn’t at the time: when singing “you are the only one” to the tune of Tico Tico at the beginning, there is a slight sway to the body. This was not part of the original libretto, but something Deboray observed in one of the dancers at the Findhorn residency and added to the score. The sway, “of course!” is on its own timing, separate from the singing!

Finally, I showed a little bit of each section from “Paired Spectacular.”

Hmmm. Maybe in the future, I will assign someone to take notes of what comes up in the talking part of our sessions. Most of that has vanished, leaving only the feeling of having had some great discussion.

Comments, corrections, additions welcome and encouraged!

I am realizing after #2 just how much of a  roaming grazing sampling experience this series really is. At least that’s how it feels to me as guide: rather than deeply delving, my preparation consists of nibbling at one idea here, taking a bite or two out of that artist over there, then wandering off to ruminate on something I did or saw in say 1985 and how it connects with an event from the 60s and or a performance I saw just last week.

Up to now, I had been thinking in terms of a snarled web metaphor: we pull and pick at different strands. We then take a strand or two and use it as the basis of an experiment here at the PWNW laboratory and beyond. We do this without following any thread as far is it will go. Nonetheless it’s comforting, illuminating and challenging all at the same time to feel the tangle of histories that surrounds past and present performance making.

Attending workshop #2 were

returnees Robert, Dana, Lily, Lisa, Emily and Linda (me)

plus new folks Lanie, Lucy, Lindsey and Anne.

After doing the intro thing and mentioning a few names—from Stelarc to Chris Burden to Carolee Schneeman to Marina Abramovic—and touching on how the sheer physicality of the body was such a strong current dance in the Judson era (still is?), and of course practices like CI—we made a list….

Body as

machine
animal
sexed/unsexed
meat/flesh
source of wisdom
perceptual body/senses
identity–ethnic, racial, etc.
prop
site of extreme endurance
canvas
object
provocateur
probe
laboratory
post-human
site of pain and pleasure
collection of cells
actor and reactor in environment
part of nature
food
site of disease, mobility, disability
expressor of non-beauty, non-technique

We then worked in pairs — and one trio — to quickly create something to show something about the “materiality” of the body.

Wow! Working fast is sometimes so satisfying.

Memory glimpses: Lily bent over butt to us, palpating and spreading her ass and Lanie’s ceremonial exposure of leg. Lucy and Lindsey (Hey the ‘L gang!) as they transitioned from mechanical to perceptual; overlaid with a social behavior gloss; the weight of a body being tossed in the trio by Lisa, Anne & Emily and the separation into two plus one with Emily as soloist mirroring one half of a physically interwtwined duet; the mystery of the “go” in Robert’s and Dana’s piece, and the clear build up from control to momentum via repetition.

After talk and break we then took a sharp turn into the ideas of experiential anatomy and body systems via an organ sensitization exercise from Bonnie Cohen.

Finally after circling up again, we did a “replay” a la Tuning Score of images and experiences from the day.

Sunday October 12, 2008 was the first session for the “history in the making” workshop at Performance Works. Linda (me), Lily, Lisa, Emily, Robert, Dana, Tahni, Lucie, Fawn, Maesie and Lois were there.

People trickled into the sun-filled space starting at 11 AM to find Linda (me) on the floor in the midst of a sprawling set of books about dance and performance. I had been looking through them the night before and decided to leave them in their scattered and seemingly random proximity—a visual representation of the web of words, ideas, histories, memories, images, aesthetic genealogies and influences that continue to weave in and out of work made today.  A pull-out poster from the last issue of BOMB magazine served as another fun visual emblem and charting of interwoven strands of influence …this specifically of the “Downtown Body,” i.e. that of New York’s Downtown avant-garde.

We chatted, paged through books and finally gathered in a circle to introduce ourselves. We talked about our relationship to dance and performance and why we were here. I wish I could remember what everyone said—and I invite all to comment below on this and any other point! It was exciting to hear the span of experience—in terms of making/performing and in terms of reading and talking about performance and its history.

My own impetus for starting this project was both personal and community-driven and hinted at in my invitation. I think it has something to do with getting older!

I came to dance late, in my mid to late 20s. Although I had majored in theater and had experienced a big dose of second and third-hand Grotowski, I only started to dance as such a few years after moving to NYC, part of a generation that started making work in the 80s, pretty much halfway between the Judson group years and where we are today.

In these last couple years I have been able to immerse myself in different ways and to different degrees with the work, past or present, of the folks a generation (or more) ahead. I have discovered more about Anna Halprin because of City Dance. I have put Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A into my body with the help of Linda K. Johnson. I learned a Deborah Hay solo in 2005, practiced it almost daily for a year, and then performed it. Last February we hosted Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton here at PWNW for the Tuning Project.

All this, plus my own extensive memories of seeing and making work within the NYC downtown scene in the 80s and 90s, in Mexico in the mid 90s and in the NW since 1998, gives me a wealth of possible associations to make across time and space. When watching performance, I can’t help but try to contextualize. I attempty to figure out how this relates to that,  what’s similar, what’s different, what looks similar but comes from different impulses, what looks really different but is somehow connected, and on and on. And in my own practice, I am aware, sometimes only subliminally, of the ghosts of all those others that flicker in and out of the room, dancing with and through me. This workshop gives me a chance to visit these “ghosts” and to catch up on the work of people I’m not that familiar with, but whose work has created a context for the kinds of work I do.

That’s the personal part. The community part was wanting to talk to people about performance and dance and also wanting to share both my fairly good library of books and my own sense of being part of a history that’s bigger than Portland. But when it comes down to it, that motivation is actually personal too—I want others to know my context and where I came from.

The questions we had fun wrestling with first session were Task as Dance || Dance as Task & Use of Objects. This topic of course is connected to other questions that artists have been dealing with for decades such as wanting to let the real world in, “doing” rather than “expressing”, and so on.

We approached these via movement exercises, short quotes or references culled from some of the books, discussion, and watching a couple of clips: Trio A and a solo by Anna Halprin from late 50s where she keeps falling down and getting up and then takes of clothes and puts them in her shoes and then tries to hide crouching behind her shoes.

Before talking about a given question—e.g. what task in performance is—I wanted to see what people thought “task” was by asking for it in movement.  So we all did short solos that somehow demonstrated our own conceptions of this word. Later we did solos involving an individually-chosen object used in “ordinary”, “extra-ordinary” and “animating” ways.

When the talking part came, of course, the original question spawned more questions, such as

What’s the difference between task and simple pedestrian behavior?

If one starts to involve movement invention extraneous to the task, is it still task?

Does it matter?

What is task-like movement that doesn’t involve objects?

Somewhere during the day we discussed the value of knowing what has been done before, and wondered whether some strategies lose their point when they are not new anymore. An example was a recent performance experience watching a longish action done in “real time.”

I’m going to make a separate post with a short list of books (Lisa asked me for some basic suggestions) and perhaps a couple of links.

Comments are invited!